LA Clippers Should Take a Look at Wes Unseld, Jr.

With the coaching searching ramping up for the LA Clippers, I argue they should consider Wes Unseld, Jr. as a candidate for their next head coach.

The interview process hasn’t even begun yet, and there’s already a million names on social media being tossed around. From alleged frontrunner Ty Lue to out-there names like Phil Jackson or Jeff Van Gundy, everybody has their person to turn around the LA Clippers. Mine is Wes Unseld, Jr.

Wes hasn’t been a head coach before, so he fits an argument I’ve already made that the Clippers should hire a rookie head coach. Despite that, he’s got name cachet and has been around the game of basketball for a really long time; as the son of Hall of Famer Wes Unseld, he was spending time in locker rooms as early as 5 years old.

His time as a coach is long, even though he’s never been a head coach; he worked as a scout for the Washington Wizards and Washington Mystics from 1997 to 2005, when he was hired as an assistant coach for the Wizards.

He’s given the lion’s share of credit for creating that Wizards offense with Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison. Check out how those Wizards ranked leaguewide by offensive rating after he took over

• 2004-05: 10th
• 2005-06: 6th
• 2006-07: 4th
• 2007-08: 12th

Afterwards, of course, the offense tanked. But I’m willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt – the next year they would rank 26th in offense, but their top 5 guys by minutes played were 32 year old Antawn Jamison, Caron Butler, Dominic McGuire, Nick Young and Andray Blatche.

So maybe he’s the kind of coach who gets great performance out of stars, but not the kind of coach who would make a bad roster decent. That’s fine! That’s not what we’d be hiring him to do.

After 6 years as an assistant coach, he left, spending a year with Golden State and a couple years in Orlando.

In 2015, Unseld, Jr. became an assistant coach in Denver, and he was made lead assistant in 2016. His main focus was to be turning around the defense. And despite having several negative defenders playing big minutes, here’s how the team’s defensive rating ranked leaguewide, year by year.

• 2016-17: 29th
• 2017-18: 25th
• 2018-19: 10th
• 2019-20: 16th

He took a defense that was one of the league’s absolute worst, and turned them into a mid-level defense that could threaten to be quite good. He has also been credited with being a part of the development of Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray.

Wes Unseld, Jr. has, at different times in his career, been assigned to build an offense and build a defense. He succeeded in both of those tasks. He’s had his work ethic praised highly, and been noted as a developer of young talent.

He can lead by example on hard work, he can get to work developing players like Ivica Zubac, Landry Shamet, Terance Mann and the other young talent. That would be a far cry from Doc’s known reluctance to play his young guys, and could be instrumental to their development (another thing we’ve written about in the past).

Plenty of coaches will be looked at by the Clippers. At the end of the day, I hope that Wes Unseld, Jr. is toward the top of the stack of potential Clippers head coaches.